ays--

"My chambre is strowed with myrrhe and incense
With sote savouring Aloes and sinnamone,
Breathing an aromaticke redolence."

Shakespeare only mentions the bitter quality.

The two qualities are derived from two very different plants. The
fragrant ointment is the product of an Indian shrub, Aquilaria
agallochum; and the bitter purgative is from the true Aloes, A.
Socotrina, A. vulgaris, and others. These plants were well known in
Shakespeare's time, and were grown in England. Turner and Gerard
describe them as the Sea Houseleek; and Gerard tells us that they were
grown as vegetable curiosities, for "the herbe is alwaies greene, and
likewise sendeth forth branches, though it remaine out of the earth,
especially if the root be covered with lome, and now and then watered;
for so being hanged on the seelings and upper posts of dining-roomes, it
will not onely continue a long time greene, but it also groweth and
bringeth forth new leaves."[14:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[13:1] Numbers xxiv. 6; Psalms xlv. 8; Proverbs vii. 17; Canticles iv.
14; John xix. 39.

[14:1] In the emblems of Camerarius (No. 92) is a picture of a room with
an Aloe suspended.

ANEMONE.

By this, the boy that by her side lay kill'd
Was melted like a vapour from her sight,
And in his blood that on the ground lay spill'd,
A purple flower sprung up chequer'd with white.
Resembling well his pale cheeks, and the blood
Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.

_Venus and Adonis_ (1165).

Shakespeare does not actually name the Anemone, and I place this passage
under that name with some doubt, but I do not know any other flower to
which he could be referring.

The original legend of the Anemone as given by Bion was that it sprung
from the tears of Venus, while the Rose sprung from Adonis' blood--

+aima rodon tiktei, ta de dakrya tan anemonan.+

_Bion Idyll_, i, 66.

"Wide as her lover's torrent blood appears
So copious flowed the fountain of her tears;
The Rose starts blushing from the sanguine dyes,
And from her tears Anemones arise."

POLWHELE'S _Translation_, 1786.

But this legend was not followed by the other classical writers, who
made the Anemone to be the flower of Adonis. Theocritus compares the
Dog-rose (so called also in hi